Lifeboat Foundation

What is it with this thin sheet of paper that makes it so precious? It’s not only the proof of acquired knowledge but plays into the reputation game of where you were trained. Being a graduate from Harvard Law School carries that extra glitz, doesn’t it? Yet take a closer look, and the diploma is the perfect ending to the modern tragedy of education.

Why? Because universities and curricula are designed along the three unities of French classical tragedy: time, action, and place. Students meet at the university campus (unity of place) for classes (unity of action) during their 20s (unity of time). This classical model has traditionally produced prestigious universities, but it is now challenged by the digitalisation of society – which allows everybody who is connected to the internet to access learning – and by the need to acquire skills in step with a fast-changing world. Universities must realise that learning in your 20s won’t be enough. If technological diffusion and implementation develop faster, workers will have to constantly refresh their skills.

The university model needs to evolve. It must equip students with the right skills and knowledge to compete in a world ‘where value will be derived largely from human interaction and the ability to invent and interpret things that machines cannot’, as the English futurist Richard Watson puts it. By teaching foundational knowledge and up-to-date skills, universities will provide students with the future-proof skills of lifelong learning, not just get them ‘job-ready’.

After 85 years of searching, researchers have confirmed the existence of a massless particle called the Weyl fermion for the first time ever. With the unique ability to behave as both matter and anti-matter inside a crystal, this strange particle can create electrons that have no mass.

The discovery is huge, not just because we finally have proof that these elusive particles exist, but because it paves the way for far more efficient electronics, and new types of quantum computing. “Weyl fermions could be used to solve the traffic jams that you get with electrons in electronics — they can move in a much more efficient, ordered way than electrons,” lead researcher and physicist M. Zahid Hasan from Princeton University in the US told Anthony Cuthbertson over at IBTimes. “They could lead to a new type of electronics we call ‘Weyltronics’.”

So what exactly is a Weyl fermion? Although we’re often taught in high school science that the Universe is made up of atoms, from a particle physics point of view, everything is actually made up of fermions and bosons. Put very simply, fermions are the building blocks that make up all matter, such as electrons, and bosons are the things that carry force, such as photons.

In December 2019, the United States established its new space force: the United States Space Force. A logical step in a globalized and digitized world whose infrastructure depends on satellites in space. This infrastructure is under threat. Also by a resurgence of conflict between East and West. This episode of Spacetime describes how the military conquered space and why the world is in a new arms race in Earth orbit.

#documentary #spacetime #usa.

Continue reading “SPACE FORCE: The Secret Orbit — Arms Race in Space | SpaceTime — WELT Documentary” »

A new program can streamline the process of creating, launching and analysing computational chemistry experiments. This piece of software, called AQME, is distributed for free under an open source licence, and could contribute to making calculations more efficient, as well as accelerating automated analyses.

‘We estimate time savings of around 70% in routine computational chemistry protocols,’ explains lead author Juan Vicente Alegre Requena, at the Institute of Chemical Synthesis and Homogeneous Catalysis (ISQCH) in Zaragoza, Spain. ‘In modern molecular simulations, studying a single reaction usually involves more than 500 calculations,’ he explains. ‘Generating all the input files, launching the calculations and analysing the results requires an extraordinary amount of time, especially when unexpected errors appear.’

Therefore, Alegre and his colleagues decided to code a piece of software to skip several steps and streamline calculations. Among other advantages, AQME works with simple inputs, instead of the optimised 3D chemical structures usually required by other solutions. ‘It’s exceptionally easy,’ says Alegre. ‘AQME is installed in a couple of minutes, then the only indispensable input is as a simple Smiles string.’ Smiles is a system developed by chemist and coder Dave Weininger in the late 1980s, which converts complex chemical structures into a succession of letters and numbers that is machine readable. This cross-compatibility could allow integration with chemical databases and machine-learning solutions, most of which include datasets in Smiles format, explains Alegre.

A growing number of firms are turning fungi roots into clothing and building material.

Dedicated to ending the HIV epidemic — dr. moupali das, MD, MPH, executive director, HIV clinical research, gilead sciences.

Dr. Moupali Das, MD, MPH, is Executive Director, HIV Clinical Research, in the Virology Therapeutic Area, at Gilead Sciences (https://www.gilead.com/), where she leads the pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) clinical drug development program, including evaluating the safety and efficacy of a long-acting, twice yearly, subcutaneous injection being studied for HIV prevention. Her responsibilities also include expanding the populations who may benefit from PrEP.

Continue reading “Dr. Moupali Das, MD, MPH — Gilead Sciences — Dedicated To Ending The HIV Epidemic” »

NASA has released a breathtaking time-lapse video captured from the International Space Station showing a recent aurora over Earth.

Scientists have made a freak discovery that’s potentially brought us closer to dinosaurs than we’ve ever been before.

Archaeologists uncovered one of the most well-preserved dinosaur fossils — so preserved that its very skin was still intact after all these years.

Talk about a good skincare routine, the discovery is now being hailed as a ‘one-in-a-billion’ find.

Sir Fred Hoyle was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. He also held controversial stances on other scientific matters — in particular his rejection of the “Big Bang” theory, a term coined by him on BBC radio, and his promotion of panspermia and the Steady-state theory of the universe.